Posts Tagged writing

Scriptwriting: Part 3 by ‘Michael Robert Johnson’

Posted by Andrew Michael Brown in movie scripts, screenplays, screenwriting, scriptwriting on May 20th, 2009

There’s a fantastic analogy made by Stephen King in his book

On Writing (which is well worth a read) on the subject of story. He likens the process of fashioning a story to that of uncovering a specimen in archaeology, that you chip and brush away at the tiny fragments until finally you have uncovered a complete entity. I think he’s really right about this, because ALL STORIES SHOULD ADHERE TO THEIR OWN INTERNAL LOGIC. It’s one of the most widespread mistakes in script writing, and it largely involves making characters do things that they clearly wouldn’t do in reality (or even worse, in the reality you’ve set up).

You know what it’s like, watching a crap film, when a character suddenly does something outrageously stupid or completely out-of-character, and it’s all because the writer suddenly makes them do something for the sole reason that that the plot requires them do it – it is sheer laziness. This is what I mean about writing being a craft. If you want to do it, you have to adhere to the internal logic; and if you want a character to do something, you have to make it believable for him or her to do so.

I’ll make the example very basic. Say, at a particular juncture in the events, that your main character has a choice of three different avenues to pursue: now the lazy way is simply to have him choose the route – avenue 3 – that leads him to the desired climax of the story, but in real life (i.e. internal logic) it’s not so simple, there may be a variety of reason why avenues 1 or 2 may be taken. The best way to adhere to logic is instead of making him decide which route to take, find reasons that actually prevent him from taking avenues 1 or 2.

Just remember to listen to your characters, if you understand them enough, they will tell you which way the story is going to go next; and be prepared, because it’s often in an entirely different direction to the one you thought you were taking. This is one of the reasons why the rigidity of the “three-act structure” or the card system can work against you, because sometimes you need to hear your characters speaking before you know what will happen next.

To be fair, a lot of this can be worked out when your first draft is complete and you’re going back through it.

As your first draft will more than likely be from the point of view of the main character, it’s important to go through it again making different “passes” for different characters. By that I mean going right through the script and looking at the all events from the point of view of each minor character. This is the best way of finding out whether or not they’re behaving realistically; finding out if – when someone responds to the hero with the reply “yes, that’s not a problem” – the real response is actually, “are you crazy? They know where my wife and children live!”.

A lot of this comes down to really getting to know your characters and the worlds they inhabit – in their own heads and beyond. Most of them are simply versions of you who have been through different experiences. But don’t mistake this difference. Say, for example, you have a character who suddenly gets a gun pointed into their face; if that person is a soldier, or a bodyguard or an armed robber, they’re going to act differently than if they are a teacher or singer; and if they are the latter, they’re going to turn cold, feel faint and possibly shit themselves. Just because they are your heroes, you can’t fake bravado in the face of cold reality, it just won’t wash.

Mike Johnson is a scriptwriter

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Scriptwriting: Part 2 by ‘Michael Robert Johnson’

Posted by Andrew Michael Brown in movie scripts, screenwriting on May 20th, 2009

Before anything else, here are a few practical tips, largely to do with making your work easier to read. It’s important to remember that your script will almost definitely go through the hands of a script-reader, someone with a huge pile of scripts to get through. Because of this, they will speed-read quite a lot of the page (all of it if you don’t make it interesting), and it’s up to you to present your material in such a way that it goes into their head as easily as possible. So…

Try to give your characters names of differing lengths: it’s a lot easier to take in who’s saying what if the speakers are called RICHARD, TED and MR. STEVENSON than if they’re called DAVID, JAMES and STEVE. (You don’t have to stick with these in the dialogue – in speech they can call each other whatever you want them to – just as long as their character name is consistent ahead of the dialogue and in the stage directions).

Put your scene headings (INT. POLICE STATION – DAY) in bold, it makes the location changes much more obvious, particularly during action sequences. (The Final Draft default doesn’t set them in bold, but it’s simply enough to customise)

Break up your stage directions into paragraphs, there’s nothing more tedious when you’re trying to read quickly than three-quarters of a page of unbroken text. Try to think of the action in terms of camera and break your paragraphs accordingly: when moving from one character’s actions to another; or when you think there’d be a cut from a medium-ish shot to a close-up; that sort of thing.

However, DO NOT WRITE CAMERA DIRECTIONS,

it works against you, in much the same way as writing huge, long chunks of description at the beginning of every scene does. This is information for camera and art department, not for an initial reader; the best chance your script has is if it reads at roughly the same speed on the page as it eventually will on the screen.

If information has to be imparted, do it within the scene, through the movements or action of characters; learn how to INTEGRATE, and you will do your work much more justice.

The basic mistake is to think that describing exactly what is in your mind’s eye gives the reader a more accurate picture of the location. It doesn’t, what it gives is a glut of information that blurs the initial image the reader will have in their head from the first sentence.

This is an example of how I think description is done best. Say your character is coming into a seedy bedsit (already, if you use those two words, it creates a fairly strong image in the reader’s mind), don’t give us half a page of the bed, the sink, the walls, etc. just give us something like:

JOHN walks into the seedy bedsit, its filth illuminated by a single, unshaded light-bulb.

Now there’s enough in that single sentence to produce an image in the reader’s mind that is more than enough to play the scene in. It doesn’t matter that the image may be bit different for each reader, the idea is to put them immediately into a place the action can take place in.

- LEARN TO LEAVE OUT AS MUCH AS YOU CAN.

Like good music, good writing is as much about the beats you leave out as those you put in.

That said, you should really make the effort to write your stage directions as good as you possibly can, because if they aren’t interesting, they will get skipped and the reader will miss a lot of what is going on in the script. If the stage directions are economical, pithy and enjoyable to read, more of your script will cross that huge gulf between the printed page and the reader’s mind.

‘Mike Johnson’ is a scriptwriter

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